One of the primary goals of synthetic colloidal chemistry is to create new kinds of particles that have a wide variety of shapes and functionalities and overall sizes in the range from a few microns to a few nanometers. The dominant approach taken by many groups worldwide is through bottom-up synthesis, including “self-assembly” (Whitesides, G. M.; Grzybowski, B. Science 2002, 295, 2418) of atomic, molecular, and supramolecular components. Self-assembled structures can be simple, such as spheres (Antl, L.; Goodwin, J. L.; Hill, R. D.; Ottewill, R. H.; Owens, S. M.; Papworth, S.; Waters, J. A. Colloid Surf. 1986, 17, 67) disks, (Mason, T. G. Phys. Rev. E 2002, 66, 60402), platelets (van der Kooij, F. M.; Kassapidou, K.; Lekkerkerker, H. N. W. Nature 2000, 406, 868), and cubes (Murphy, C. Science 2002, 298, 2139). They can also be more complex, such as tetrapods (Mokari, T.; Rothenberg, E.; Popov, I.; Costi, R.; Banin, U. Science 2004, 304, 1787), clusters (Manoharam, V. N.; Elsesser, M. T.; Pine, D. J. Science 2003, 301, 483), liposome-microtubule complexes (Raviv, U.; Needleman, D. J.; Li, Y.; Miller, H. P.; Wilson, L.; Safinya, C. R. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 2005, 102, 11167), and colloidosomes (Dinsmore, A. D.; Hsu, M. F.; Nikolaides, M. G.; Marquez, M.; Baush, A. R.; Weitz, D. A. Science 2002, 298, 1006). Random thermal forces cause colloidal particles to diffuse rapidly in a liquid regardless of their structures; this Brownian motion can overcome gravity and keep the particles dispersed homogenously over long times (Russel, W. B.; Saville, D. A.; Schowalter, W. R. Colloidal Dispersions; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K., 1989). Despite the increasing sophistication of self-assembly approaches, including multistep procedures, that have produced a rich variety of new structures (van Blaaderen, A. Nature 2006, 439, 545), no universal recipe currently exists for creating monodisperse colloids that have arbitrarily prescribed shapes and sizes using bottom-up approaches. In addition, various groups have micromachined individual or small numbers of structures (P. Galajda et al, App. Phys. Lett. 78, Jan. 8, 2001; T. Tanaka, et al, App. Phys. Lett. 80, Jan. 14, 2002; H. Sun et al., APS 170, 169-293, 2004) or have employed raster scanning in parallel (J. Kato et al., App. Phys. Lett. 86, Jan. 18, 2005). However, these approaches are complex and have not been demonstrated to be scalable to the production of very large numbers of microscale or nanoscale particles. There is thus a need for improved methods of producing microscale and nanoscale particles and improvements in such particles produced.